A Mother's Help
by SamCyberCat
Summary: Fubuki’s mother tried to help him a lot in the past, but as he got older she accepted she needed to help him in unnoticeable ways. Ryo/Fubuki, Tenjoin-mother's POV.


Notes – For the gx_100. Set after season two, during the summer holiday before season three started. The parental figures for Fubuki and Asuka in this story are the same as the ones from "Paint Smiles", but you don't need to read that story to understand this one.

---

Her son never particularly asked anyone for help. Though that wasn't to say he didn't iexpect/i help from anyone. Fubuki was one of those people who expected everyone else to know when he needed help and be able to provide that without having to ask them for it.

As his mother it was her job to try and notice when he needed help, or at least she liked o think it was. That was how a good mother should care for her children after all.

Asuka had never been as much of a problem as he had. She'd always been a levelheaded child from the word go and if she ever did need something she had always been more inclined to ask her father for assistance than her mother. But Fubuki was different entirely in that regard.

When he'd got older his mother started to worry that she had spoiled him somewhat while he was growing up, and he now walked around the world expecting everything to go just how he planned it. His plans were getting wilder and wilder too.

The academia was good for him. Or at least it had been until he'd been kidnapped and presumed dead for at least a year. But once he'd come back everything seemed to work out all right in the end, albeit with a lot of details that were hushed up about the incident and didn't even make it back to his parents' ears.

He started to learn to be independent, or else he was doing a good job of talking other people into doing his work for him. Even as a loving mother she sometimes suspected that. Regardless, if that was how he would get by in the world than at least he was learning for himself what worked and what didn't.

Despite this she worried for him. He may not be her little boy anymore but she still wanted to look after him. Though now she had to make do with doing that in little ways that he wouldn't notice.

An area she kept away from was Fubuki's love life. She knew a lot about her son, and she suspected more, but she would never pry in that area of his life. Whether or not he chose to date women was not her business. She only hoped that the men he may have chosen to be interested in were nice men.

Not like… not like that friend he'd had in the first year. The Ryo Marufuji boy. It was such a shame too; when Fubuki had first introduced Ryo to her he seemed like such a nice person, so polite and respectable. She wouldn't have minded so much if Fubuki had been interested in him then.

But recently she'd heard thing about the boy. She hadn't believed those things at first until a friend had showed her one of those glossy magazines they printed covering the careers of Pro League duellists. After that she'd caught one of his matches on TV by chance and saw the changes for herself.

Ryo was ruthless now. He fought opponents with no respect, treating those he defeated like they weren't even worthy of the ground they walked on. She couldn't understand how such a change could come over someone so quickly.

It wasn't, however, her place to understand. She had met the boy once or twice before but that didn't mean she knew him well. Before worrying about his friends it was the Tenjoin mother's role to worry about her son. And if her son hadn't been affected by the changes in Ryo than that would have been the end of it.

Fubuki had been affected though. Not noticeably so, he was good at putting on a brave face and grinning at people as the world crashed down around him, but a mother noticed things that other people did not. Fubuki's mind was wandering more lately, he tended to disappear to be on his own a lot more only to rely on people accepting he was enigmatic when he came back, and once when he had come back for the summer she'd caught him watching a Pro League match on TV before quickly turning it off as she walked into the room.

He'd hung around the room long enough afterwards so that she couldn't check what he'd been watching, but TV guides did exist, and glancing through one she saw that what Fubuki was watching at that time had indeed been one of Ryo's matches.

Fubuki was worried for Ryo. But he was just a student, and had no way of getting in contact with the other boy now.

She knew that she should hate Ryo for what he'd done to her son. She knew that she should pick Fubuki up and put him on the right track, hoping that he'd pursue any guy iexcept/i that Ryo Marufuji. But she knew that Fubuki was close enough to being an adult to make his own choices, and she could help him more by supporting him than she could by objecting to these decisions.

So she hunted high and low, looking for something small that could help him out. Phone line bookings were useless, you always got through to a machine and made several wrong button pushes before getting onto a person who'd tell you to call another department. And the Internet wasn't much use either. All of the websites came up with the same results – high-level Pro League matches were always sold out.

By the time she'd actually found what she'd been looking for she'd almost given up hope. It was lucky for her that her boss happened to be interested in duelling but too busy to attend some of the matches he wanted to go to see. She'd thank him fully, vowing to work hard to make up for what he had given her.

And now she had it – a single ticket to a Pro League match that included a duellist under the alias of Hell Kaiser, which she'd learned to be Ryo. She could give this to Fubuki now and he would go, almost definitely. And one way or another his life would change.

Could she live with herself if she'd let him walk right into heartbreak?

No. That was his choice. Whether he spoke about his feelings to Ryo or not was for him to decide, and he was responsible enough now to make the decision that was right for him.

Even so she didn't want to give him any proof that she was worrying too much. So the ticket was left on a little table in his room, no note attached and no sign of where it may have come from. As long as he didn't ask he didn't need to know.

It turned out he didn't ask. Though the next time she checked the room the ticket was gone. He was out the night of the match too.

The next day she didn't ask about how it had turned out, this was one more of the unspoken deeds she did to help him.


End file.
